Performance evaluation of topology discovery protocols in software defined networks

Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a new promising network environment in terms of efficiency, complexity, and management. The key innovation of SDN is the separation of the network into two planes: the data plane and the control plane. The control plane gathers up-to-date topology information from the data plane using topology discovery protocols. This process, known as topology discovery process, is of the utmost importance to the SDN network functionality, performance, and scalability. In this paper, we analyze and evaluate the performance and scalability of the de facto discovery protocol, the OpenFlow Discovery Protocol (OFDP) and its variants. Our analysis and evaluation are supported by detailed experiments in a range of random topologies in Mininet network emulator with POX controller.